Maybe it was the gym. You got the membership, bought the gear, and rode the wave of motivation for a week or two. But then work got busy, life got noisy, the wave flattened, you found excuses not to go and the new ritual slowly faded.

As I write to you and reflect back now, I think back to that moment of taking the decision. I was stepping into the unknown. I, as we all humans do, crave certainty, but I intentionally chose a path of great uncertainty. At the time, my mind was spiralling through all the things that could go wrong. What if I failed? What if we ran out of money? What if I wasn’t good enough?

Some of us, such as Leonardo da Vinci, are fortunate enough to have an unbroken cycle of passion from childhood to adulthood. Leonardo’s father remarked on how he loved painting and sculpting as a child and as soon as Leonardo was old enough, his father took him to apprentice at a master painter’s studio in Florence. Yet for most of us, we have a prolonged sabbatical from our passion. Life gets in the way. Your hiatus might be 12 months or 20 years. But, what can we do when we lose that spark, that knowledge of what we truly love? We have to search for it. We have to move around the world with our eyes wide open.

As I write this entry, reflecting on my journey through business school, consulting and corporate, I know something must change. I don’t have the language or the plans but at 35,000 feet, some light has crept into my spirit – something Plato wrote about 2,400 years ago.